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2025 Recap: so many projects
I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head.
There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet!
facet
facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity.
Day 1 (Advent of Code 2020)
I was not planning on doing anything specific this December, but a lot of folks around me (on Twitter, at work) have chosen this Advent of Code to pick up Rust, and I’ve got big FOMO energy, so, let’s see where this goes.
I’ll be doing all of these on Linux, so there may be some command-line tools involved, but don’t worry about them - the code itself should run on all platforms no problem.
Getting in and out of trouble with Rust futures
I started experimenting with asynchronous Rust code back when futures 0.1
was all we had - before async/await. I was a Rust baby then (I’m at least
a toddler now), so I quickly drowned in a sea of .and_then, .map_err
and Either<A, B>.
But that’s all in the past! I guess!
Now everything is fine, and things go smoothly. For the most part. But even
with async/await, there are still some cases where the compiler diagnostics are,
just, so much.
Improving error handling - panics vs. proper errors
Before we move on to parsing more of our raw packets, I want to take some time to improve our error handling strategy.
Currently, the ersatz codebase contains a mix of Result<T, E>, and some
methods that panic, like unwrap() and expect().
We also have a custom Error enum that lets us return rawsock errors, IO errors,
or Win32 errors:
pub enum
rawsock
stdio
Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch
I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.
Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.
As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.
Recursive iterators in Rust
I’ve been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn’t exist, so I guess it’s my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.
The task at hand
Let’s say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:
struct Node {
values : Vec < i32 >,
children : Vec < Node >,
}
This allows you to represent a tree-like structure:
[1, 2, 3]
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \
[4, 5] [6, 7]
Damian Sommer on The Yawhg
Damian Sommer did a casual AMA on Reddit recently, about his upcoming game, The Yawhg. I got to ask him a few questions. Here’s what he had to say.
What brought you out of your usual “let’s make fucked up platformers” style?
“I was just kind of tired of them. There’s still one more platformer I really want to finish, (The Clown Who Wanted Everything), but besides that, I’m just extremely bored of them now.”
sam, homebrew-mingw, etc.
I want to write blog posts, but right now I have too much to do.
So instead, here are bullet points:
I wrote an ooc tool named sam, which helps you keep your git repos up-to-date, and helps to remind you what to push when switching workstations. It’s pretty neat, and portable.
A while ago, I started working on homebrew for Windows, or rather, for MinGW+MSYS. Provided you have msysgit and Ruby in your PATH, it’ll let you brew install most packages. I’ve tested a few dozen, send in your pull requests anytime.
The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious!
Today’s pick is the latter.
Reproducing the issue, part 1
(It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important part of figuring it out, so.)
I’ve never used Emacs before, so let’s install it. I do most of my computing on an era-appropriate Ubuntu, today it’s Ubuntu 22.10, so I just need to:
What's in a Rainbow table?
In Veronica Mars and password hashes, from my new Tech As Seen On TV series, we’ve explored “cracking passwords” using brute-force methods, and then using rainbow tables, which was much, much faster.
But how do rainbow tables actually work? Let’s start at the beginning.
What’s a password hash?
A very simple design for an authentication system is to store passwords in
clear text, say, in a file named password.txt: